One-to-one marketing has long been considered a holy grail for business. Marketers strive to perfectly personalize the right message to the right consumer at the right time.

Technology and large data pools are bringing marketers ever closer to that goal. Yet one-to-one marketing can also be, well, creepy. Marketers have to walk a fine line between useful personalization and going too far.

Amazon recently announced a concept grocery store called Amazon Go without lines or checkout counters. It’s currently open in beta only to employees. From their patent filing, cameras and sensors would monitors consumers around the store and record what they browse and what items they pick up. Facial recognition technology could also be used. Presumably the vast personal data collected on each consumer’s shopping history would also be at play.

RealRelevance tracks consumer sentiment in an annual “Creepy or Cool” survey. In 2016, 67% thought it would be “creepy” for facial recognition technology to identify you as a high value shopper and relay that information to a salesperson. 64% thought it would be “creepy” for a sales person to greet you by name on the shop floor because your mobile phone signals your presence.

Yet age plays a factor in what is considered creepy or cool. 49% of Millennials thought it would be “cool” for your location in a store to trigger personalized product information, relevant content, recommendations and discounts on your phone as you walk the aisles. Yet only 40% of consumers overall found that “cool” versus “creepy.”

It will be interesting to see if what is considered creepy today becomes commonplace over time.

As marketers adopt new technologies that allow greater and more granular one-to-one marketing, I think that “Creepy or Cool” will be a good filter question to ask.

8 Comments

Nice article although they never said personalized messages should be sent out via public “mass media”! One way to pull off targeted offers without being creepy is to obfuscate relevancy. I like the TARGET example given in this article: http://lnr.li/zqTKj/

Memo to young, tech besotted wizards: one to one marketing is nothing new. In the simpler times of a yesteryear now romanticized by hazy mythology, the corner grocer, druggist and butcher knew exactly what his (almost always) customers needed and wanted to buy. Such friendly, welcome service became creepy only with the advent of faceless corporate behemoths, whose “targets” can’t have the mutually personal relationships they once shared with local merchants. That is, it’s OK for you to know about me if I also know about you. Otherwise, you’re just a despicable, computerized privacy pirate!

Talking of cornerstore grocer, I’m reminded of a book called SUPERMARKETWALA. Author Damodar Mall, one of the doyens of the Indian organized retail industry, talks of how cornerstone grocers use their personal knowledge about you to trigger purchases of specific items that you may otherwise have forgotten to order during your visit to their stores. He goes on to say that organized retail doesn’t do that and considers non-invasion of privacy as one of the major advantages of big box retailers. Ironically, we’re back to waxing eloquent about the power of customer insight and how organized retailers and other service providers should be using it for carrying out segmented / 1-to-1 marketing!

Good point. And I think it reflects the need for permission marketing to usurp the traditional interruption model. The closer we get to being able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, the more essential it becomes that the message be delivered in the context of a relationship with the consumer. Skipping that, is where the creepy comes in.

Creepy / Cool is always a good thing to “monitor” as it is a razors edge as I have written about in the past (http://bit.ly/2ns8pju). But I might add that part of the creepy part may be driven by an emerging 21st century sense of “shame”. In other words it’s not so much that some merchant knows about my personal habits or needs/wishes but rather that somehow others might find out. Even in your toons it’s the embarrassment of the ‘broadcast’ of private information that adds to the humor.

It may be that right behind the “how did they know that” sensation comes the “what if others find out” fear. Privacy and the human sense of public versus private is evolving faster than individuals, let alone algorithms, can adapt to. To be ever vigilant about where that razor’s edge of a line between creepy and cool lies is not only wise but anticipating how your firm will react when you cross it would be time well spent before the inevitable crisis hits.